Monday, 7 April 2014

Book Review of The Terminals by Michael F. Stewart

Behind the Walls of Nightmare is pleased to participate in another Tribute Books blog tour as we welcome Michael F. Stewart, author of The Terminals (Episode 1: Spark).

The Terminals: Book Summary

Sometimes the dead don’t want to
talk.

You need Terminals to make them.

Terminals solve crimes in this realm by investigating them
in the next.

Lt. Col. Christine Kurzow, fresh from a failed suicide attempt
after she cost 11 of her soldiers their lives, is recruited into
the covert unit of Terminals as a handler. It's an easy sell. If
she's really determined to die, it’s a chance to give her death
meaning.

But her first case—convincing a monk to chase Hillar the Killer
into the afterlife to find the location of a missing bus and the
children it carried—has her wondering how to make a dead
psychopath talk.

Christine must follow the clues sent back by the shotgun-toting
monk, who tracks Hillar through the seven deeps of hell, so she
can find eleven kids before it’s too late.

Michael F. Stewart is the author of the
Assured Destruction series, which sprawls across three books, two
websites, one blog, seven Twitter accounts, Tumblr, Facebook, and six
graphic origin stories. He likes to combine storytelling with
technology and pioneered interactive storytelling with Scholastic
Canada, Australia and New Zealand’s anti-cyberbullying program
Bully For You. He has authored four graphic novels with Oxford
University Press Canada’s award-winning Boldprint series.
Publications of nonfiction titles on corruption and children’s
rights by Rubicon Publishing, as well as early readers
with Pearson, are all forthcoming in 2014 and 2015.

For adults, Michael has written The Sand Dragon, a horror about a
revenant, prehistoric vampire set in the tar sands; Hurakan, a Mayan-themed thriller which pits the Maya against the MS-13 with a New
York family stuck in the middle; 24 Bones, an urban fantasy which
draws from Egyptian myth; and The Terminals—a covert government
unit which solves crimes in this realm by investigating them in
the next. This series has already been optioned for film and
television with production rights having been sold to
Jim Donovan (Best Director 2013, Canadian Screen Awards) and on
to his partners of Sudden Storm Entertainment.

Herder of four daughters, Michael lives to write in Ottawa where
he runs free writing workshops for teens and adults.

Our Review of The Terminals
Michael F.Stewart has chosen an intriguing theme for his new series of adult novels entitled The Terminals. The premise is that those who are dying can be enlisted to solve crimes in this world by connecting with previously departed individuals in the next. (Imagine, for example, being able to communicate with a suicide bomber to learn the targets of future attacks.) The link between the two worlds is the psychic Atilla, who is able to receive information sent back by the terminal. Terminals are carefully chosen based on their religious and spiritual beliefs in order to enter into the realm that the criminal or terrorist inhabits in the next world. In the first episode of The Terminals, the criminal is a vicious killer named Hillar who has been killed in a police shootout after kidnapping a busload of children. The job of the Terminals Unit is to track down the location of the missing children, who are facing death without food and water to sustain them. Chosen as the terminal is Charlie, a monk who is well-versed in Gnosticism, to which the killer adheres, and who must undergo an epic battle with the forces of evil to find out the children's location.

Michael F. Stewart has written a dark thriller that explores the themes of guilt, suicide, illness and suffering, spirituality, and the underlying need for human beings to believe that their lives (and deaths) serve a greater purpose. At the same time he has woven the quest motif and the universal struggle between good and evil into the novel.